Great shot, Lou. Thanks for posting it here.
Leonard and West Broadway isn't your typical Manhattan intersection. What you're looking at is the underground infrastructure (maybe a vault, but hard to tell) sitting at the nexus of four major NY City communications buildings, which are fairly close to being equidistant from one another:
-- 32 Avenue of the Americas, once the HQ for AT&T's Long Lines Dept., now a colo
-- 60 Hudson Street, once the HQ of Western Union Domestic, now a colo
-- 50 Varick St, an active Verizon switching office and special services hub
-- 323 Thomas Street, one of two "tombs" built by AT&T in the 60s and 70s, this one originally for Int'l and Private line
All of these are less than a half-mile of one another (less than a quarter-mile from the nexus), with some only a couple blocks from its closest neighbor in the pack. Another 1.5 miles to the north you have monster colo 111 8th Avenue, and a similar distance to the south sits 140 West Street, which was once the HQ building for Verizon and more recently the CO that survived September 11th, but only barely. So it's safe to guess that a fair number of those conduits and cables go from and to vaults in the buildings cited above.
Did you happen to notice which agency/contractors were doing most of the work "down there", and why the street had been opened in the first place? Curious ...
FAC
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